Hotel Highlights

Wonderful spa; subtropical gardens and a private beach

Huge choice of watersports and other activities

Stunning Indian Ocean setting – ideal for complete relaxation

Overview

Set in around 20 acres of beautiful tropical gardens, The Oberoi hotel, Mauritius, occupies an enviable spot overlooking Turtle Bay on the gorgeous northwest coast of Mauritius. A honeymooner’s heaven, it offers everything you need for an idyllic island break – palm-thatched villas with Indian Ocean views, two gourmet restaurants and a spa in which therapists will pummel away the pressures of your life at home. It’s bliss.

Smith Extra

Here's what you get for booking The Oberoi with us:

A bottle of champagne and a 30-minute jetlag therapy massage for two on the day of arrival

At the hotel

Our favourite rooms

Every room has a four-poster bed and marble bathroom with sunken bath and shower, as well as a private terrace. The Royal Villas are the most decadent option, set within their own generous tropical gardens complete with large private swimming pools and thatched dining pavilions, though the Luxury Villas with Private Pool tick all the right sumptuous and pampering boxes, too.

Poolside

The huge infinity pool, fringed by rocks and atmospheric crumbling columns, offers amazing views out across the 600m beach and over the Indian Ocean.

Packing tips

Bring binoculars. Even in the unlikely event that you’ll stay on shore throughout your stay, you’ll want to get a good look at the dolphins, flying fish and reef sharks frolicking in the crystal-clear waters of the Indian Ocean.

Also

As you'd expect, a full range of watery entertainment is on offer: windsurfing, waterskiing, diving and sailing are among the activities you can try. As well as a sauna, steam bath and pool, the Spa has private spa suites and a beauty parlour.

Children

Kids are welcome at the Oberoi. Up to two under-eights can stay in their parents’ room for free. Extra beds are complimentary.

Food & Drink

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Hotel Restaurant

The Restaurant, an open-sided pavilion with a high thatched roof, specialises in classic European and Asian dishes, as well as local Creole cuisine, and is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The Lagoon Pool Restaurant offers a less formal lunchtime menu of salads, sandwiches and pasta dishes.

Hotel Bar

A relaxing space under a thatched roof, in which you can recline with wine, cocktails or even a cigar.

Last orders

The last drinks are poured at 11pm.

Room service

24 hours.

Smith Insider

Dress code

Fresh and floaty – lots of white to show off tans.

Top table

Ask for a private table down on the beach, and dine on fresh seafood with your feet in the sand.

Local Guide

The Oberoi

Baie aux Tortues, Balaclava, Terre Rouge, 20108

Planes

Fly into Sir Sewoosagar Ramgoolam International Airport (named after a former Prime Minister). Mauritius is well connected to international cities with daily flights operated by Air Mauritius and other airlines including Air France, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, Condor and Emirates. The airport is a 55-minute drive from the hotel.

Automobiles

The hotel is a 22-minute drive (15km) from Port Louis, and 10 minutes (seven kilometres) from buzzy Grand Baie.

Reviews

Anonymous review

‘This place is designed for romance,’ says Mrs Smith, lying back in a sunken marble bath on a bed of red rose petals. ‘Actually, it’s more than that. It’s made for Hollywood romance.’
She’s not wrong. Mrs Smith’s re-enactment of the famous scene from American Beauty is, in fact, just one example of the A-list treatment that’s been meted out …

The Oberoi

‘This place is designed for romance,’ says Mrs Smith, lying back in a sunken marble bath on a bed of red rose petals. ‘Actually, it’s more than that. It’s made for Hollywood romance.’

She’s not wrong. Mrs Smith’s re-enactment of the famous scene from American Beauty is, in fact, just one example of the A-list treatment that’s been meted out to us at the Oberoi in Mauritius. It began back at the airport, when our uniformed driver, Raj, handed us cold towels and water, settled us into the back of a seven-series BMW, and drove us past fields of sugar cane, white Hindu temples and Jurassic Park-like crags to the hotel. And it continued with the mojitos, drunk under a thatched Indonesian-style roof, we were handed on arrival.

Our room, a villa with a pool, makes us feel like Tom ’n’ Katy/Brad ’n’ Angelina, too. Unlike the rooms you find in city-centre hotels, which have to cater for a business clientele as well as those travelling for leisure, the villas at the Oberoi have clearly been created purely for pleasure. This is obvious from our villa’s three stand-out features, each designed with couples in mind. First of all, our solid blond-wood, four-poster bed is strong enough to support a man doing pull-ups. I tried this, of course, to impress Mrs Smith – and quickly reached the conclusion that this was not a bed to be easily broken. Then there’s the cream marble bathroom, in which you’ll find a mother-of-pearl-framed mirror, floor-to-ceiling glass walls and the aforementioned sunken tub, which, when we first walked in, was filled with yellow and white frangipani flowers. Best of all, though, is the total privacy. The villa is not overlooked. You feel undisturbed and undisturbable. Swimming in the pool, chatting on the steps of the pool, drying off on the loungers – and anything else you do in your villa’s garden – is an entirely secret affair.

However, we haven’t come to Mauritius for a bath. We cross our garden, unlock the gate and make our way over to the Oberoi’s main pool – a black volcanic rock-framed delight lined with deep-blue tiles and surrounded by statues. ‘It’s like being in an Indiana Jones film,’ says Mrs Smith as she breaststrokes her way across the pool while attempting to keep her hair and Ray-Ban Wayfarers from getting wet. ‘Follow me,’ she says, speaking in the conspiratorial tone she uses with our young nieces.

So we swim from the end with the long-nosed, big-lipped Easter Island-esque statues, past the half-submerged goddess heads and under a vast iron bell to the restaurant end of the pool. Here, at a table just two feet from the turquoise, beach-lapping waters of the Indian Ocean, we eat a delicious fish salad. Afterwards, we take a post-prandial paddle, walking hand-in-hand along the line where waves break gently on the shore, emerging only occasionally from the swell to feel warm white sand between our toes and inhale clear, salt-tinged air.

Afterwards, in the Moroccan-style spa, we submit ourselves to the unforgiving fingers of the Oberoi’s resident masseuses. We’re led through to a covered area outdoors, and laid side by side. This isn’t the ideal combination for a relaxing rub-down a deux. Mrs Smith is a medium-pressure person. For me, it’s no pain, no gain; and I can only apologise to my wife for masking the tranquil sounds of the waves, and the pheep-pheeps, w-ra w-ras and y-up, y-ups of the birds, with a constant cacophony of ‘aaaaarghs’, ‘oh, oh, oh, ows’ and sharp intakes of breath, as the cat's cradle of knots in my back is satisfyingly untied.

I drifted off. I think we both did. Then we wandered back, in our robes, to the privacy of our villa for a lie-down on that vast bed. Later, after a dinner of shrimp and taco root cake with a passionfruit and coconut sauce, we find ourselves in the bar. Here, we listen to a guitarist play acoustic versions of Cyndi Lauper songs as we sip strawberry mojitos made with cracked pepper, lemon and mint, and rock in an exquisitely carved Indonesian love swing. It’s an ideal place from which to see the sunsets, we’ve been told, but we’ve arrived too late for that. We have to settle for night’s black-and-white alternative: spotlit palm trees, an inky black sea and a half-moon.

Back in our villa, a mere 70 yards away along the oceanfront, the bath has been filled anew with hot water and thousands of red rose petals. ‘This place is designed for romance,’ Mrs Smith tells me, slipping the blue spaghetti straps of her dress from her shoulders…

The Guestbook

Whenever you book a stay at a Smith hotel with us, we'll invite you to review it when you get back. Read what other Smith members had to say in The Oberoi's Guestbook below.

Lucienne

BlackSmith

Stayed on
11 May 2013

We loved

Food is of a very high standard. Staff is very nice and friendly and genuinly interested. Rooms are spacious and most rooms have a sea view. The resort is quite small and therefore very personal and exclusive. Buildings and gardens are very well maintained. We noticed all people go decently dressed for dinner as the hotel has a policy of no slippers or shorts after 6pm. After the Oberoi, we stayed at the Four Seasons, which doesn't have a dress code beyond smart-casual: people come in shorts and bedroom slippers, etc, which was very weird. We would definitely go back to the Oberoi.

Don’t expect

We stayed last year at the Oberoi and noticed there were very few children, which is an added bonus for us and one of the reasons to go again. This year there were quite a lot of children, quite noisy as well, spread all over the restaurant. It would be nice if they could keep the children in one area of the restaurant and set a time after which small children are not allowed in the restaurant anymore.

Rating:
10/10 stars

Price information

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